On Sunday, 40 soldiers from Japan’s Ground Self-Defense Force participated in the biennial Talisman Sabre exercise in northern Australia, jointly held by the US and Australia.

Japan’s involvement in the massive military event followed a flight on June 23rd of one of its P-3Cs over contested waters. The patrol plane flew about 100 kilometers west from the Philippine island of Palawan into the South China Sea. The craft came close to Reed Bank, claimed by both Manila and Beijing, and then headed back to base. On board, three Filipino military personnel accompanied the Japanese crew of 13.

Contrary to Beijing’s expectation, President Obama declined a Pentagon request to receive Chinese General Fan Changlong, vice chairman of the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, while he was in Washington during his five-day visit in June. Fan, described by the South China Morning Post as “a military heavyweight and one of President Xi Jinping’s most trusted right-hand men,” is the first CMC vice chair in at least two decades—perhaps the first ever, as some report—not to meet with a sitting American leader during an official visit to Washington.

It appears Fan was slighted at the Pentagon as well. The general did not get the usual 19-gun salute at his welcoming ceremony, nor was it particularly well attended by senior American officers. In the end, the delegation was denied the DC pomp and ceremony and those prized White House photo ops that authoritarian regimes crave to show their legitimacy to audiences back home.

On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s wealthiest businessman, Li Ka-shing, said he was “very disappointed” over the Hong Kong government’s failure to enact its reform package for the 2017 election of the chief executive, the city’s top political official. When asked who was responsible for what is now widely called a fiasco, Li ducked the question. “Everyone in Hong Kong is discussing this,” he said.

He’s right. Just about everybody in Hong Kong is talking about the events that unfolded last Thursday in Legco, as the city’s Legislative Council is known. The legislators, after a 20-month drama, finally voted on China’s proposal to “reform” the procedures for the election of the chief executive.

From December through April, hackers exfiltrated personal data on almost 4.2 million US federal employees and contractors.

The attacks, on the network of the Office of Personnel Management, appear to be an attempt, as the Washington Postreported, to build a database on Americans, especially those in sensitive positions. This conclusion looks correct: the same party that carried out the OPM hacks may be behind attacks last year on the health insurers Anthem and Premera Blue Cross.

Uriminzokkiri, the state-controlled North Korean website, recently criticized South Korean President Park Geun-hye for planning to go to Washington in the middle of this month instead of commemorating the 15th anniversary of the inter-Korean summit, which falls on June 15th. Park is scheduled to meet President Obama on June 16th.

“Why does she plan to visit the US, the prime enemy that divided the two Koreas?” Uriminzokkiri asked. “This shows the repetition of Park’s bad habit for making overseas escape.”

There was never much possibility of a joint celebration of the now-maligned summit in 2000, but North Korean propagandists are correct to point out that Park has traveled abroad to great powers. And as she does so, she is controversially changing Seoul’s outlook toward the world.

On Sunday, Gloria Steinem, two Nobel Peace laureates, and 27 other women crossed the Demilitarized Zone from North Korea into South Korea in an attempt to bring peace to the long-divided and troubled peninsula.

“We have received an enormous amount of support,” said Steinem, the 81-year-old women’s rights activist, on her arrival in the South. It is also true that she and her group, WomenCrossDMZ, also faced a chorus of sharp criticisms.

Much of the criticism centered on Steinem and the others not confronting the North Korean leadership over the horrific plight of women in that miserable state. Yet the group’s activities—both in Pyongyang, where they congregated before the crossing, and during the crossing itself—raised other issues. Among them is the most difficult Korea question faced by countries and international organizations, whether to isolate or engage the regime led by the Kim family.

General Hyon Yong Chol, North Korea’s defense minister, was executed at a military academy near Pyongyang “around” April 30th, at least according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.

Some analysts contend the NIS report is implausible, but, whether it is accurate or not, there has been an evident acceleration in the pace of executions. The deaths suggest to others that the Kim family regime is no longer stable.

There are experts who believe Hyon is still alive. He was featured in a documentary aired by North Korean state media on May 14th. Normally, the airing would be proof the NIS report was false. As Sue Chang of the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch site explains, “That Hyon was not edited out of that production raised eyebrows in light of the regime’s habit of expunging officials from public materials once the officials have been eliminated.”

There is a property boom in Pyongyang, the capital of the destitute Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. The boom, in turn, has created an impetus for economic reform.

Apartment prices have skyrocketed 30-fold since the turn of century. The most expensive unit now goes for about a quarter of a million dollars, a large sum in a country where official wages are not even $2 a month.

That, at first glance, is amazing, especially because all property—including every single housing unit in the country—is owned by the state.

As Richard Lloyd Parry of the Australianexplains, owners—if they can be called that—do not actually have title. They occupy their apartment after “swapping” residences with “sellers,” who receive compensation for taking less-desirable units in exchange. All transactions are approved by state bureaucrats, who attend to necessary paperwork for under-the-table payments.

Beijing’s exchange of allegations with Manila over the South China Sea became increasingly nasty this week when the Chinese Foreign Ministry, on May 5th, accused the Philippines of “malicious hyping and provocation.” China accused its island neighbor of illegally seizing its possessions in that body of water. China claims almost all the islands, shoals, rocks, and reefs there as sovereign territory.

Beijing’s undiplomatic language accompanies its contention that the Philippines and other nations had, by building facilities, violated the nonbinding Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea, signed November 2002 by ASEAN states and China.

On April 22nd, Xinhua News Agency reported that China’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection released a wanted list of 100 individuals—77 men and 23 women—accused of corruption. Beijing is trying to get foreign governments to cooperate with its efforts to apprehend the suspects.

Of the 100 listed, 40 are believed to be in the US, and Beijing also maintains that in total there are more than 150 “economic fugitives” now in America.

Chinese law enforcement officials have had some success in obtaining American assistance. Washington’s collaboration, however, raises fundamental issues for any free society.

On April 13th, Ri Su Yong met his Indian counterpart, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, in New Delhi. The trip is thought to be the first time a North Korean foreign minister has visited India.

Ri’s mission highlights North Korea’s attempt to isolate China, its only formal military ally, and establish new relationships in Asia and elsewhere.

Ri last week discussed his country’s nuclear weapon program and asked for additional humanitarian aid. Yet the topics of conversation were not nearly as important as the fact that the meeting took place at all, not to mention in the Indian capital.

India is in the market for subs, but it’s having trouble buying the best ones. Indian Defense Minister Manohar Parrikar, during a two-day meeting in Tokyo at the end of last month, reportedly asked his counterpart there, Gen Nakatani, to offer to sell six of Japan’s Soryu-class diesel models. The Japanese, according to a source in the Indian Defense Ministry speaking to Defense News, were “non-committal.” The apparent hesitance suggests that New Delhi might want to rethink the application of its “Buy and Make in India” program.

Chinese troops provoked a confrontation with India’s soldiers twice last month in Ladakh, according to reports that surfaced over the weekend. The incursions—elements of China’s People’s Liberation Army advanced south over the Line of Actual Control into Indian-controlled territory—took place in the same area as an incident in April 2013 that roiled relations between the two nations. The line, a little more than 4,000 kilometers long, serves as a de facto border between India and China.

The provocations last month—on March 20th and 28th—were reported to be on the agenda when Indian Defense Secretary R. K. Mathur and his team sat down with Chinese officials in Beijing Wednesday and Thursday for preliminary talks. The discussions took place before their seventh annual dialogue, to be held on Friday.

On Friday, the Asahi Shimbun, a Tokyo newspaper, suggested that Chinese ruler Xi Jinping was building a “Zhejiang faction” by promoting longtime acquaintances, some from the Nanjing Military Region of the People’s Liberation Army. Xi served in party posts located in that district.

The report is striking because Xi is at the same time attacking factionalism inside the Communist Party. “Banding together in gangs, forming cliques for private ends, or forming factions is not permitted,”the official Xinhua News Agency stated after a December 29th meeting of the Politburo, the high party organ.

Xi’s attack on factionalism, while attempting to form a faction of his own, is roiling the Communist Party.